The best TV shows let us live vicariously through their characters: their wealth, their romances, their happiness and rage. Their world-building can transport us to other times, countries, and universes. But in the wake of 2020’s Covid-19 pandemic, even the most mundane TV moments had the potential to be aspirational. We watched people live mask-less lives, among friends, family, and even crowds of strangers.
With so many public events shut down—or, in the case of sports games, peopled by bizarre simulated crowds—TV this year became, more than ever, our distraction of choice. New shows became impromptu cultural events: The Queen’s Gambit sparked a renewed interest in chess, born out of our months-long solitude, while our fascination with weirdo fuckups manifested the collective embrace of the Tiger King. Even old shows found new lives through wider streaming availability, as the sardonic, hilarious misery of The Sopranos tapped into our current anxieties about generational rot and the mess left for the future.
When we have less going on, we look to entertainment to speak for us. The drama, the relief, the tension, and the comedy hits harder. Shows like Ted Lasso, The Good Place, and Joe Pera Talks with You are often praised as some sort of balm for our times, their gentler quality representative of “what we need right now.” But we need to give voice to other things too: despair and alienation (Perry Mason, Unorthodox, and I Am Not Okay with This); introspection (I May Destroy You and The Virtues); and our complicated feelings about companionship and the prospect of needing other people (We Are Who We Are, Primal, and Normal People).
When locked away from the world, the vicarious experience amplifies. The way we perceive TV is changed, at least for now. But whether we latched onto entertainment because it revealed some inner truth or simply because everything looks like a mirror in the midst of cabin fever, these are the shows that spoke to us most in a year where everything seemed to speak to us more loudly than ever before. Steven Scaife
25. What We Do in the Shadows
Sequestered in modern-day Staten Island, the ancient vampires of What We Do in the Shadows are woefully out of touch. Early in the mockumentary’s second season, a rare invitation to a human party delights and then disappoints them, when they realize that they’re celebrating the Super Bowl rather than a Superb Owl. The riotous escapades that Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) stumble into highlight relatable fears—lost time, growing irrelevance, unwelcome solitude—and gradually reveal the tragic and poignant truth that underlies the show’s otherworldly comedy: these bloodsuckers want out of their monstrousness and in to human society. Meanwhile, they deny Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), Nandor’s meek familiar, his wish to become a vampire not out of principle, but out of apathy—pushing away the one person who cares about them and unknowingly nudging him toward his vampire-hunting destiny. The joke, it seems, is on them, for hoping for an escape from their centuries-long drift into obsoletion that doesn’t involve a stake in the heart. Niv M. Sultan
24. The Great
Like Yorgos Lanthimos’s alternately riotous and poignant The Favourite, which series creator Tony McNamara co-wrote, The Great rejects the commitment to historical fact that burdens many period pieces. The series chronicles the attempts of the future Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) to depose her new husband, the doltish Emperor Peter of Russia (Nicholas Hoult), with gleeful irreverence. Its jarringly crass dialogue, abundant in period-drama affect and dripping with verve, initially highlights Catherine’s alienation as a naïve idealist, prim and proper and shocked by her court’s vulgarity. In time, however, Catherine embraces crudeness, her speech assuming the harsh bloodiness that lands crowns atop usurpers. The Great occasionally lends startling poignancy to its depiction of Peter, a vicious man-child more interested in philandering than leading. Moments that expose Peter’s vulnerability, like a shot of him curled up on a statue of his father, render his arrested development more tragic than laughable. They also make the tension nestled in the show’s title increasingly plain: Great is both what Catherine will become and what Peter will never be. Sultan
23. Stumptown
ABC may have reversed its decision to produce a second season of this scrappy drama following resourceful but troubled private detective Dex Parios (Cobie Smulders), but that still leaves 18 lively episodes, half of which aired in 2020. Expanded from the comic book series by Greg Rucka, Matthew Southworth, and Justin Greenwood, Stumptown brings a welcome character-driven approach to the familiar network-TV crime-procedural template, focusing on military veteran Dex’s issues with guilt and PTSD, without ever compromising her sarcastic confidence. Smulders combines the comedic charm she displayed in How I Met Your Mother with the gritty determination of her turns in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, while Jake Johnson as Dex’s best friend and Michael Ealy as her police source give the show’s Portland a lived-in feel that exists at the intersection of artisanal hipster culture and black-market criminal activity. Yes, there’s a love triangle, and there are some predictable cases of the week, but at its best, Stumptown evokes the lighthearted, fleet-footed private-eye series of the ’70s and ’80s, when the rumpled, weary crime-solver would wrap up each mystery with a smile and a sigh. Josh Bell
22. Curb Your Enthusiasm
With each new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm comes the concern that the hijinks of creator/writer/star Larry David may eventually tip over into out-of-touch cringe, as the series is so deeply rooted in a kind of upper-class myopia. And yet, true to his alter ego in the show, David somehow comes out largely unscathed, with the 10th season making light of such topics as sexual harassment, white supremacy, and cancer without ever going for the cheap shots you’d expect. One would be forgiven for balking at the mere presence of Harvey Weinstein references and MAGA hats, subjects that had seemingly lost all comic potential well before January’s airing of the season’s opener. But Curb Your Enthusiasm’s success has always been powered by conscious agitation, making absurd the rituals and discourses du jour, then generating high-wire screwball comedy in the unraveling of decorum. Key to this carnivalesque spectacle is the way in which the 10th season’s elaborate plot—a long-game of petty vengeance in which Larry becomes a coffee shop entrepreneur just to humiliate “Mocha Joe,” the competitor whose scones he doesn’t like—treats no character as a moral compass, and certainly not Larry himself. They’re all just working their own grifts. Carson Lund
21. Corporate
This dark satire of life in middle management at a giant, soulless corporation never quite reached beyond a cult following, but creators Matt Ingebretson, Jake Weisman, and Pat Bishop stuck to their hilariously bleak vision all the way through the third and final season. Unlike in The Office, where the employees at Dunder Mifflin built a makeshift family while doing their mind-numbing jobs, everyone at Hampton DeVille is miserable and connections among co-workers are just a fleeting way to distract from the emptiness of existence. Even as that sense of futility expanded outward in the show’s final episodes, Comedy Central’s Corporate remained bitingly funny and even weirdly hopeful in its nihilistic attitude. If nothing matters, then there’s no reason not to indulge whatever weird whim comes to mind. The main characters, played by Ingebretson and Weisman, will never leave their jobs and will never achieve anything meaningful, but at least they can approach their existential despair with a laugh. Bell
20. Central Park
This giddy animated musical may be the next best thing to seeing a live Broadway show. Creators Loren Bouchard, Nora Smith, and Josh Gad combine the earnest absurdity of Bouchard’s Bob’s Burgers with the grand ambitions of a large-scale stage production, packing each half-hour episode with multiple songs that could easily anchor a major musical. Gad gives his least annoying performance ever as the show’s exuberant narrator, chronicling the mundane yet majestic lives of Central Park manager Owen Tillerman (Leslie Odom) and his family. There’s a serialized narrative about a nasty old rich lady who wants to buy the park and turn it into condos, but the show’s greatest strength is its ability to turn small moments into epic musical numbers. Bell
19. The Queen’s Gambit
A project based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit has evidently been languishing in development since the mid-2000s, but it’s difficult to imagine anyone but the 24-year-old Anya Taylor-Joy playing Beth Harmon, Tevis’s fictional chess champion. A master of casting gazes that seem to be directed more inward than out, Taylor-Joy embodies the taciturn and enigmatic orphan turned chess savant—and is no small part of the show’s success at making silent chess matches so engrossing. Another part of that success is the perfect balance that director Scott Frank finds between telling us what’s going on in a given game and letting us just feel it. The stakes of Harmon’s every match, which mostly take place between the early and late ’60s, are clear—she’s the only woman in almost every chess competition she enters—without needing much emphasis. Instead of deadening that energy by enumerating the difficulties of being a young woman in those spaces, the series channels it into thrilling showdowns between Harmon and representatives of the establishment in both the United States and the Soviet Union: powers opposed on the global stage but united by chess and patriarchy. Pat Brown
18. Bob’s Burgers
Arguably the most devoutly working-class TV comedy since Roseanne, Loren Bouchard’s stalwart animated series recently heralded its 200th episode with a grease fire at the restaurant. Rather than a crisis moment, this served as an opportunity for a Rashomon-style exploration of who started the fire from differing viewpoints—complete with musical interludes. Likewise, this season of Bob’s Burgers has seen eldest child Tina foiled from joining a club because her father can’t find her birth certificate, and the entire family taking sick from a pinworm outbreak on their way to a symphony concert. It’s long past clear that the Belchers aren’t destined for a financial windfall, a vacation, or even a timely rent payment anytime soon, but the series has somehow become sweeter and more consistent as it’s confronted that fate. Christopher Gray
17. My Brilliant Friend
If the first season of this adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s quartet of Neapolitan novels was primarily concerned with world-building and faithfully constructing the physical and psychological worlds of its large cast of characters, season two found the series staking its claim as a work of visual art with its own sensibility. Along with developing the identities of Lila (Gaia Girace) and Elena (Margherita Mazzucco) as political thinkers and lovers entering adulthood, My Brilliant Friend found dazzling ways of entering their minds, in no small part thanks to the work of director and cinematographer Alice Rohrwacher and Helene Louvart in standout episodes “The Kiss” and “The Betrayal.” Though the flinty charisma between the two leads remains the heart of the books and the series, this season of My Brilliant Friend augurs well for the show’s increasingly expansive vision. Gray
16. BoJack Horseman
“Closure is a made-up thing by Steven Spielberg to sell movie tickets.” So said BoJack Horseman to Diane Nguyen in season one of the Netflix series. Six years later, in spite of those words, the conclusion of BoJack Horseman deftly handled its own denouement—not just in sticking the landing on its interwoven dramatic arcs, but also knowing which loose ends to leave untied. Following the first half of the final season’s gut-punch of a cliffhanger, the remaining episodes find BoJack haunted by both his actions and inactions. The series never loses sight of the fact that some wrongs can never be righted, that some wounds never heal, but it also recognizes how happiness can coexist with sorrow. The show’s greatest touch may be the resolution of Diane’s character, whose weight gain following her choice to use antidepressants becomes an implicit symbol of her happiness. In its final stretch, the show’s writing was never better, its empathy never deeper, and its penultimate episode ranks as one of the most heart-wrenching half hours of visual storytelling ever. Rob Humanick
15. The Good Place
Only four episodes of The Good Place aired in 2020, but those were some of the best in the show’s four-season run, including the brilliant finale, written and directed by creator Michael Schur. Without ever losing its focus on goofy humor and warm character interactions, The Good Place explored some of humanity’s deepest philosophical questions, eventually creating a vision of the afterlife that’s both welcoming and mysterious. And while that vision is thoughtful and hopeful about humanity as a whole, it’s also quite specific to the characters, providing satisfying closure for the show’s humans—and supernatural entities). Kristen Bell, Ted Danson, William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, Manny Jacinto, and D’Arcy Carden all found moments of grace and ridiculousness in bringing their characters’ stories to an end, embracing the profound connections and silly wordplay that made them a joy to watch from the very first episode. Bell
14. Search Party
In contrast to the defining visual of Search Party’s first two seasons—a tracking shot of Dory (Alia Shawkat), which prioritized her reactions and impressions over the stimuli eliciting them—season three often depicts her in faux news reels and talk-show clips. Rather than centering Dory as she moves through the world, these sequences freeze her in a still image, embodying her objectification at the hands of the media frenzy. The alienation she feels as tabloid fodder eclipses what she once felt as an aimless personal assistant. But Dory is far from powerless, as she’s remarkably adept at steering the narrative of both her life and the trial. Search Party’s earlier seasons found joltingly dark humor in the absurdity of four clueless, sheltered, relatively young adults playing detective and then committing and covering up a murder. This season rivals its predecessors in its intoxicating blend of bleak cynicism and irreverent comedy, but embraces a more exaggerated, madcap sensibility. Sultan
13. I Am Not Okay with This
Seventeen-year-old Sydney Novak (Sophia Lillis) has powers that she can’t quite control. In Netflix’s adaptation of Charles Forsman’s graphic novel I Am Not Okay with This, those powers become a metaphor for such stock things as mental illness, social discomfort, emotional repression, body changes, sexual discovery, and adolescence in general. Sydney’s surly narration moves things along at a wonderfully brisk pace that’s faithful to the original material: Of the seven episodes, most of them clock in at around 20 minutes, leaving plenty of space to suggest angst and disillusionment around the edges without simply wallowing in misery. By focusing on the emotional turmoil deftly conveyed by its cast and leaning on a wicked sense of humor, I Am Not Okay with This transcends its pat concept. Scaife
12. Normal People
The rare literary adaptation so capacious it seems to subsume a reader’s mental image of what it should look like, Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald’s take on Sally Rooney’s zeitgeisty novel runs addictively hot and cold, like a more reticent—that is to say, Irish—Call Me By Your Name. Despite running a roomy 10 episodes, Normal People is only glancingly concerned with stalwart coming-of-age issues such as the life of the mind and how we’re molded or scarred by our families. Though it touches on those themes sensitively, the series uses most of its space to home in on the politics of intimacy, and Daisy Edgar-Jones and the extraordinary Paul Mescal have a preternatural ability to capture its vagaries: those minor fissures or lapses in attention that feel like profound violations of an enduring, undeniable physical bond. Few shows know how to burrow so precisely in their feelings. Gray
11. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!
The joy of creation and creativity infuses every frame of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, Science Saru’s anime adaptation of Sumito Ōwara’s manga. Under the guise of a film club, three ambitious schoolgirls set up an anime workshop in a dilapidated school building, where they get so swept up in their work that the concept art and individual animation frames come to life. These scenes have a pleasantly scrappy atmosphere, where the girls interact with full-scale renditions of their sketches—complete with a sparser color palette and sound effects made by human voices. But the series remains surprisingly technical, too, demonstrating the sheer difficulty of animation process, especially with so few people involved, as they learn to compromise for the sake of finishing their art at all. By deftly highlighting details like the role of a good producer and the way an audience may be swept up right alongside the creators, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! depicts creative collaboration as an infectious miracle. Scaife
10. Big Mouth
The opening episodes of Big Mouth’s fourth season send the show’s three pubescent principle characters to summer camp, that hallowed institution of tweenage sexual experimentation. This archetypical coming-of-age space allows for the introduction of new characters—like Natalie (Josie Totah), the show’s first trans character, and Seth (Seth Rogen), the show’s first Seth Rogen character—and it also emphasizes that Big Mouth doesn’t look at its characters as static caricatures. As Andrew (John Mulaney) and Nick (Nick Kroll) enter their middle school for eighth grade, they brag to no one in particular (i.e., the audience) that they’ve managed to actually age, throwing shade at Bart Simpson for being stuck in fourth grade for three decades. Nick and his associated peers, hormone monsters, and jazz-legend ghosts sometimes dish out such meta humor at an alarming pace, condensing the identity crises of adolescence into trenchant metaphors, or sometimes a catchy song. Witness the premiere of Tito the Anxiety Mosquito (Maria Bamford), who buzzes self-doubt and imposter-syndrome misgivings into Nick and Jessi’s ears, or Devon’s (Jak Knight) explanation of code-switching to Missy (Jenny Slate/Ayo Edebiri) through satirical song. Big Mouth’s devotion to its characters makes it more than just a show on which Kristen Wiig voices an exceedingly chipper vagina. Brown
9. Unorthodox
When Esther “Esty” Shapiro (Shira Haas) flees from her Haredi Jewish community in Williamsburg, New York, we immediately understand why. The strict community has so many rules about when you can go out, what you can wear, and especially your role as a woman within their society. Esty is expected to do her part to rebuild the many millions of Jews lost to genocide. But Unorthodox complicates what might have been a straightforward “escape” narrative through flashbacks where Esty seems all too happy to adhere to these rules, if the community would have her. Her difficulties with sex and her own troubled family history mark her as an outlier; social and genetic factors essentially push her out, thrusting nonconformity upon her whether she wants it or not. As Esty runs away to Berlin, Unorthodox becomes not just an insightful depiction of alienation, but a reckoning with people’s diverse relationships to history, as it can restrict us as much as it can nudge us toward adaptation and change. Scaife
8. Joe Pera Talks with You
In another type of series, Joe Pera might be some wacky side character or otherwise relegated to the butt of a joke to contrast a more cynical protagonist, but the brilliance of Joe Pera Talks with You is how he instead provides the dominant perspective. The show’s 11-minute episodes are ostensibly structured around the middle-school choir teacher’s interest in mundane objects and activities: speaking directly into the camera, he discusses beans, hiking, shopping at the grocery store, and other things around his home in Marquette, Michigan. No matter how seemingly insignificant, Pera and his interests are presented with complete sincerity through gentle music and loving close-ups of objects and processes, creating an atmosphere of reserved but infectious passion through his dedication and attention to detail. Employing warm cinematography, gentle narration, and its lightly absurd portrayal of everyday life, Joe Pera Talks with You digs at a larger existential truth about our own preoccupations and how they bring us comfort when we might need it most. Scaife
7. Ted Lasso
The prospect of a sitcom based on a series of NBC Sports commercials doesn’t seem particularly promising, but Ted Lasso takes Jason Sudeikis’s caricature of a clueless American football coach from those ads and turned him into one of 2020’s most likable TV characters. In the gimmicky setup for Ted Lasso, the eponymous character is hired as the manager for a U.K. Premier League soccer club, despite knowing nothing about the sport. Rather than a boorish, loudmouthed American, though, Ted (Sudeikis) is eager and empathetic, like a sitcom version of Friday Night Lights’s Coach Taylor, bringing heart and humility to his new role. The writers build a strong ensemble around Sudeikis’s Ted, including nuanced female characters played by Juno Temple and Hannah Waddingham to balance out the typical sports-show boys’ club. Sunny and upbeat without ever coming across as disingenuous, Ted Lasso provides optimism that audiences can actually believe in. Bell
6. Perry Mason
HBO’s Perry Mason is set in 1932, and at the outset, the eponymous character is a private investigator, and hardly the respectable kind. Matthew Rhys brings a thick haze of disillusionment to Mason, who wears a lot of stubble and an expression of perpetual weariness. Reconceived in the mold of reluctant prestige TV heroes, Mason is a man adrift, with few opportunities during the Great Depression, and so he tries (unsuccessfully) to squeeze his employers for more cash, though he still misses out on paying the child support he owes. A lot of the story beats are the usual stuff of noir, with people you can’t trust mixed up in systems you can trust even less, but the series uses its central case and characters to tug at the different threads of a rich societal tapestry, deftly posing questions about religion, race, sexuality, and gender roles as the world unravels. Perry Mason is gory and dour with a bone-deep cynicism, but it’s also optimistic in its own small way, an origin story that chronicles how its characters find a means to fight rather than serving as dejected, disgusted observers. Scaife
5. The Virtues
Transience is a recurring motif in Shane Meadows’s The Virtues. The four-episode series is filled with scenes in which recovering alcoholic Joseph (Stephen Graham) trudges through city streets and countryside roads toward an uncertain future. Meadows’s work as a filmmaker has charted how misery and hopelessness manifests in post-imperial Britain; he’s always had an intuitiveness that transcends the ostensible realism of his desaturated palettes and handheld camerawork, and here he shows a new level of aesthetic subjectivity. The Virtues isn’t particularly concerned with the political history of Ireland, but rather the lingering pressures of the religious shame and abuse that shape addled individuals. The characters remain irresolute—a reminder that even facing up to one’s problems doesn’t guarantee release, but it does at least allow for the possibility of moving forward. Jake Cole
4. Genndy Tarakovsky’s Primal
Picking up in the grisly aftermath of last year’s midseason cliffhanger, Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal shows Fang the T. rex brought low, robbed of her very ability to fight for survival in an unforgiving ecosystem. And yet, Spear the caveman (Aaron LaPlante) undertakes the considerable work of nursing her injuries so that he need not continue alone. Though the wordless exploits of Spear and Fang are heightened by the prehistoric world’s inherent brutality, they thoughtfully depict essential truths about the nature of companionship—namely, that to live is to intertwine oneself with the lives of others. These characters find purpose in keeping each other going, against a backdrop of constant peril. Primal is about persisting in the shadow of death, the ever-present knowledge that someday we will be nothing except what we’ve left behind. If we are lucky, we leave some positive outcome on someone or something else. If we are unlucky, as a rabid dinosaur in one horrifying episode is, we destroy everything around us and can manage only to contribute to some greater cycle of pain. Scaife
3. Better Call Saul
To watch Better Call Saul is to stare at the weight hanging over the heads of its characters, with each season adding more to the precarious load. If this process is less traditionally exciting than the rotating villains and constant threat of discovery at the center of Breaking Bad, it’s arguably even more satisfying to see the spinoff’s distinct halves—lawyer dramedy and cartel crime show—tie themselves irrevocably together. The persistent, cheery menace of Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) and the growing complicity of Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) build to some of the most harrowing moments of suspense in either series, as the characters spiral into unexpected and terrifying yet entirely cohesive new directions. Since the abrupt probable “ending” of the first season, the show’s writers have gone on to etch some of their strongest, most patient characterizations to date, buoyed by performances from Bob Odenkirk and especially Seehorn that already rank among some of the medium’s very best. Scaife
2. We Are Who We Are
Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are concerns itself with boundaries and the way they blur, namely the one between childhood and adulthood, which is hardly a rigid one. Accordingly, the show’s kids sometimes seem wise and mature and accepting beyond their years only to fly off the handle and engage in that distinctly teenage brand of solipsism, where the people around you don’t matter nearly as much as you and your own feelings. They’re able to be pretentious and profound on entirely their own terms, rather than seeming like mouthpieces for middle-aged screenwriters. They leave atrocious messes in their wake, badger a lot of people, and act downright annoying, which feels true and honest in a broader sense than the occasional small detail that rings false. They have the space to change, while the adults ruminate on the decisions—the marriages, the jobs, the beliefs—that they’ve long since committed to. We Are Who We Are explores a world that’s opening up to these kids just as it is, in many ways, preparing to snap closed. Scaife
1. I May Destroy You
In the final episode of the British comedy-drama I May Destroy You, actress, writer, and series creator Michaela Coel confidently defies convention and, with it, any expectation that the events of the series, like life, can be tied into a tidy knot. Privileging character over plot, I May Destroy You has no need for the kinds of melodramatic reveals on which other cable dramas like Big Little Lies rely, and it proves no less revelatory on that front. Coel draws one of the most nuanced portraits of sexual assault and its psychological fallout ever depicted on TV, and along the way captures the milieu of black millennial Londoners with precise and vivid detail. But she isn’t simply out to demonstrate the many variations of sexual assault in the manner of a sex education video; rather, I May Destroy You examines how sexual, racial, and gender exploitation weave themselves into people’s identities and attitudes. At once hyper-local and global in its concerns, the series feels eminently contemporary, a necessary artistic distillation of a distinctly modern form of life. Brown
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